The best selling video game of all time is Wii Sports. This title came bundled with the Nintendo Wii console from which it derives its name, and to date has sold over 82 million copies, by virtue of its bundled nature. Wii Sports served as an instantly playable demonstration of what the Wii’s motion controls were capable of from the get-go. Since everyone knows how to play tennis, swinging a small white remote to move a digital racket helped newcomers connect with this never-before seen platform.

Today, gaming once again has a new platform to contend with: Virtual reality. And once again, traditional sports are being used to teach us how to play all over again.

VR Sports Challenge is the first virtual reality title from Sanzaru Games, an organization best known so far for Sonic Boom on the 3DS and its remastered ports of both God of War and Sly Cooper. VR Sports Challenge will be bundled for free with the highly anticipated Oculus Touch controllers when they release on December 6th, 2016. The game lets you try your new virtual hands at four sports: baseball, basketball, hockey, and American football. However, rather than relegating itself to a simple collection of mini-games, VR Sports manages to create a surprising amount of depth and cohesion which should serve as an example for how to do games of this ilk going forward.

Everything in VR Sports is tied together by the idea of Franchises. No matter what sport you’re playing it all connects back to an overall franchise that can be managed from a virtual office space. In your new mahogany throne room you have the chance to examine your trophies, pick your sponsors, and switch up your team name as you go. Franchise mode helps the disparate athletic experiences in VR Sports feel as if they belong to something bigger. This is a welcome shift from the play-it-and-move-on routine that other gaming collections typically stick to and feels reminiscent of the sporting theme of RIGS.

The sports themselves are also surprisingly deep. While you do have the chance to simply play 3-point shootout, hockey fighting, home run derby, or other vertical slices of each game, the core experiences each do their best to create a more fulfilling experience.

In football you play as both the quarterback coordinating the perfect drive, and the all-star receiver he is passing to. In basketball you switch from player to player as the ball is passed and you jockey for the perfect scoring position. In hockey you play as the goalie until you make enough saves and then, suddenly you find yourself in the skates of a forward making a fast break towards the opposite net, etc. etc.

Each position you move to offers a new way to use the Touch controllers and this really is the core of what VR Sports is all about. It’s a showcase for these new devices, a sort of hyper-extended tutorial that keeps the process of discovery feeling fresh and fun. Each blocked shot, swished basket and perfect pass teaches you something new about Touch and helps bond you to the product.

This isn’t to say that the experience is perfect, however. VR Sports tries to do a lot. There’s at least a dozen different game mechanics across all the different sports. Most of these work well and many of them are truly brilliant utilizations of the controllers, but some of them have their problems. If you’re not careful you’ll miss the occasional shot in hockey, fumble a dribble in basketball or strike out in home run derby. Most, if not all of these can be avoided by adjusting your sensors, body position or adding a little extra concentration, but they are notable none the less.

Multiplayer is also sorely missed in VR Sports Challenge. It’s a blast to pass the headset around your living room and watch your friends try to score touchdowns and hit home runs, but it would have been amazing to have some sort of competitive mode both locally and over the internet, especially in 2016 where online multiplayer is essentially a requirement for competent sports titles.

Final Score: 8.5 – Great

VR Sports Challenge is a fantastic entry point for Oculus Touch users and a truly enjoyable experience in its own right. It has hours of content, nearly infinite replayability, and enough creatively designed game modes to keep you coming back again and again. This is much more than a simple launch-day mini-game collection and if this is the type of game Oculus is giving away for free, we can’t wait to see what it comes up with next.

The first rule of fight club is do not talk talk about fight club. The first rule of urban, underground, magic fight club is always make sure your fireball is fully charged before throwing it. Welcome to The Unspoken.

At the core of The Unspoken is a central question: What if magic was real? What if the man that sells you your coffee, the woman across from you on the train, or the oddly quiet coworker at the office, secretly had the ability to fling cop cars around like snowballs or summon death itself to attack you? What if instead of robes and cloaks, wizards wore hoodies and Chuck Taylors? And what if all of these people wanted you dead?

The Unspoken, developed by Insomniac (Ratchet and Clank, Sunset Overdrive), is the third title in a trio of VR games for the Oculus Rift. Their first two VR titles were Edge of Nowhere [Review: 9/10] and Feral Rites [Review: 5/10]. The Unspoken also has the distinct honor of being a free bundle title for the upcoming Oculus Touch platform and therefore has a lot of expectations placed on its shoulders.

Not only does it need to be a fun game worthy of highly respected AAA developers, but it also needs to justify the purchase of a $199 accessory to a horde of content hungry consumers. On both counts, it succeeds with flying colors.

This game is all about one thing: making you feel magical. Whether you are launching fireballs, summoning ancient beasts to do your bidding, or casting a perfectly timed shield, The Unspoken wants to send you on an adrenaline packed power trip from the moment you move past the title screen.

Everything in this game revolves around multiplayer combat. There is a loose story about a secret order of magicians hunting you down for flaunting your otherworldly power, but for the most part it all comes down to your fights against other players. There is no single player campaign and the only thing you can really do by yourself is a rudimentary practice mode with an A.I. opponent. The Unspoken was built from the ground up as a multiplayer battler, even if the interesting lore and scope of this game will leave you craving some sort of single player story to play through in between brawls.

Naturally, it’s important to talk about combat. Every ounce of fighting each other in The Unspoken is fun. Like, really fun. It’s addictively fun. It’s “what do you mean my electric bill hasn’t been payed in three months I’ve only been playing for an hour…oh wait,” kind of fun.

Before you even get on the battlefield you’ll need to choose a class and a load out for your artifacts. Artifacts are powerful spells that can be used once per round during a fight and involve a more complex series of gestures than the average attack to pull off. These game-changing abilities allow you to deal heavy damage with a paper airplane that turns into a squadron of fighter jets, prevent your opponent from moving with cthulu-like tentacles, or wield a lighting infused spear that cracks through any of your enemy’s shields.

In addition to these heavy-hitters, each wizard class also has its own unique repertoire of gestural spells to dish out. There are three classes in total: Anarchist (a firey class armed with flame attacks, firework barrages, and a devastating molten skull), Blackjack (a nimble class requiring more precise aim with stealth abilities, magical blades, and a pack of mystical playing cards) and Kinetic (a telepath class that uses objects from around the world to wear enemies down before finishing them off with a devastating bombardment of flying automobiles).

Each class triggers their various abilities by holding down the grip buttons on each Touch Controller and demonstrating either a push (hands together), volley (hands apart), or shield (hands crossed) pose for a few seconds. The inputs are simple but when performed inside an immersive VR duel, they make you feel nothing short of unstoppable.

The Unspoken‘s Chicago setting provides several unique and memorable maps. The stages are divided in half with an assortment of pedestals on either side. In order to move during combat you must target a pedestal on your side with a teleport spell. Some locations have cover to hide behind and both you and your opponent can destroy each other’s pedestals. The stages themselves are dynamic, changing as each of a battle’s three rounds progress to provide more pedestals, different stage hazards, and a special, almighty summon that both players must fight for by attacking a glowing orb.

The different classes, dynamic stages, strategic mobility and varying artifact load outs all work together to make The Unspoken one of the most consistently entertaining and deeply competitive VR games made thus far. Once the game is out for the public, the servers flicker to life, and the online meta starts to develop, it would not be surprising to see a game like this become a staple of the e-Sports community and perhaps even earn itself a spot on some of that industry’s most famous stages.

For the purposes of this review, multiplayer matches were arranged internally between Upload employees for the most part, so the quality and consistency of finding matches will reside entirely with the community’s interest and support. One of the most important aspects of keeping a multiplayer-only title such as this alive for any stretch of time will be infusing it with regular content updates, new classes, new stages, and new abilities beyond just the launch window. Popular e-Sports titles such as Overwatch, League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Heroes of the Storm are perfect examples to look at for how to do post-launch support correctly.

Final Score: 9/10 – Amazing

The Unspoken is a message from Oculus and Insomniac that the next level of VR gaming has arrived. This is a title that could only ever work in a VR headset and it succeeds because of, rather than in spite of, the unique capabilities of its platform. The Unspoken represents everything that is fun about playing games in VR and has all the makings of an iconic title we will still be talking about for years to come.

The Unspoken demands attention to timing and strategy without being too stressful, and has creative spell variety without being overwhelming. Each spell is conjured with a unique, but totally natural-feeling motion that’s aided by near-flawless tracking from the Touch controllers, except when teleporting between platforms is involved. And even though there isn’t a huge amount of variety in AI enemies and maps, what’s here is a special kind of VR magic.

8.0 - Great

The Unspoken is a surprisingly deep, strategic VR experience that really made me feel like a wizard.

I know you haven't been as sold on the idea of room scale as much as I have, but holy moly I don't know how you can play Bullet Train and just not lose yourself in the possibilities

It's short and sweet but I've played through it about 4 times already CANNOT WAIT for Robo Recall, the full version of the concept demo (and free for Touch owners )

Anyone else have their Touch controllers yet? Just little things like pointing at people then giving them the thumbs up without actually thinking about the controls because it's so intuitive and natural is mind blowing really So easy to set up too, I have my room scale play area mapped out and like the Vive the borders appear when I get too close. Really well implemented. And the settings carry across to SteamVR too (I've tested VR Fun House and the demo for Don't Knock Twice in Steam).

Played my first game of multiplayer Dead and Buried. Hosted a game of Horde mode actually. Played with some random. Was the friendliest MP game I've played in years. And I feel bad cos I wasn't using a microphone so wasn't talking back and at the end of the round he was talking about the next round and I quit. So he'll think I'm a dick but if he by any chance is a Rancher, I had fun

My highlight to this point are The Climb and Superhot VR both are brilliant use of the tech.

I recently grabbed Eleven VR Table Tennis on steam and despite it being pretty limited in options it's gameplay is sublime, the accuracy of the physics combined with tracking of the controller is so much more than the sum of its parts.

I also grabbed The Golf Club VR on Steam for anyone remotely interested in Golf I highly recommend it, unfortunately it has no official Rift support and it's a bit fiddly to get around given the touch controller isn't implemented properly once you got going and start playing it's amazing.

Shot 126 on my first round on casual difficulty. It's very unforgiving.The tracking is spot on and given they are planning to get all the courses from the main game it has limitless content.Can't wait for proper Rift support.

I think the reason both of these shine is because the tracking is so good there's no real assists of any type, so your success is based on your actual performance and that adds to the immersion immensely.

Guess this is the VR thread. Just bought a Vive, should arrive by Monday. $1200 on some ebay "sale". Those Rift Touch controllers look neat, but I've had a lot of fun every time I've put a Vive on. Looking forward to it.

Not sure if I have a bit of Vive buyer's remorse or not; the problem being that I've barely used the newer Rift. From what I read, the Vive is a bit better for the room scale stuff, but the Rift is a bit/a lot better at other things. The main one being the headset, and I have to agree with what I've read. The Vive's headset is fine as long as you're not moving a lot... ie., the whole point of it. And looking downwards is quite simply a problem. I'm a bit surprised that got through quality control. Fruit Ninja for example; looking down at the chutes is often a smart way to play but it's like you get punished for it a bit.

I'm not too fussed about the controllers, but that's only because better ones are apparently on the way. If that wasn't the case I'd probably consider selling the Vive right now and jumping to the Rift. Bummed to see Rift owners get Robo Recall for free too, doh! Got some free games with the Vive, they look dumb.

But definitely the headset is becoming a bit of a pain in the butt. If I get time I still might try to demo a Rift.. somewhere.. and flog this off. Are Steam VR games cross platform or what? No idea. And any downsides to the Rift I don't know about, apart from a smaller roomscale space? Even that wouldn't matter much with me; our house doesn't have huge amounts of space anyway.

That aside, other impressions:

The VR scene store-wise is looking kind of odd... there's a lot of crap, a fair few premium-priced titles, but it's very hard to get an idea for what's really good and fun. I'm not exactly sure what I'm after either; I'm more interested in it for dev. Curiously, some things are way more expensive on the Rift store than on Steam.

One cool thing on the Vive that you never hear about is the AR overlay that you can set to accompany the Chaperone system. Stand near the VR space borders and blue lines outlining everything in the real world overlay your VR view. It's actually really neat, and quite strange seeing these lines shift perspective as they follow true, real life 3D, while still looking like a video game. This sounds odd, but I was amazed at how 3D my real desk was.

Tilt Brush is good but it's an advanced and glorified tech demo; not quite a $40 title imo. Fruit Ninja is really great fun. I feel stupid carrying on about a mobile game gone VR but really it is good. Especially survival mode, where you have to actually use your space and think of your stance a lot.

Tried a bunch of other junky things, deleting as I go. The Lab is a great demo; love its arcade game.

Smacked the ceiling a few times. Oh lol, the first time I put on the headset, it recognised that I had just looked at point X. In VR, point X housed a desk and PC which suddenly crumbled and smashed to pieces. I freaked out completely and ripped off the headset, literally within 1.5 seconds of putting it on. XD

The low screen resolution is the other real killer imo. I'm fine with it as I knew what to expect, but this is a system that has you genuinely picking the red, green, and blue out of every pixel, that strains high end video cards to do so. I've seen the small but needed improvement supersampling makes, but this is just making the best of a bad situation and it becomes too much for even a 1070 very quickly. The view is just too low quality for equipment that's too expensive, so I honestly don't think VR can take off during this generation. I'm completely sold on it, but I can also completely understand the mass market simply not feeling the same way until the Rift 2/Vive 2. When you go from looking at your Tilt Brush are in the VR view, to seeing it on a 2K screen, it's a pretty savage difference.

That plus the headset are the Vive's 2 biggest problems imo. Seriously the headset shouldn't be this distracting.

Fruit Ninja is really great (I really do love it) but as good as it is, it can't be VR at its best. Not seeing the killer app yet.

Call of the Starseed - The Gallery: Episode 1 (ugh) is not as good as people say. It's a fairly standard and extremely short lived adventure. Would be good if it was longer for sure, and it definitely makes use of the VR space and motion tracking, but this achieves "decent" in my opinion, not special. And it ends the moment it starts to develop, so eh.

I've played a tonne of shovelware. Still deciding what to splash out for. Anyone played Elite Dangerous in VR?

Tried Bullet Train; very good but playing through Revive isn't a perfect experience due to the controller differences. Similarly, Lucky's Tale plays well in technical terms (and it's a great idea I think; VR presence in a 3D platformer), but simulating a joystick on the Vive's trackpad will have you wondering if the trackpads are really so special, because the conversion isn't smooth. Shame, Lucky's Tale does look pretty cute.

Anyway still slowly going through the tonnes of junk to get a feel for the thing. Oh and speaking of Revive, yeah the Rift store is way better than the Vive store. I'm yet to see anything good on HTC's store, and so much junk. Ah well, Steam.

I'm happy to learn that HTC are making a better headset for the Vive, pretty much ripping off the Rift's approach of rigid shell + built in headphones. Boy, the Vive's earbuds are terrible, just so bad. Uncomfortable, they come out, and the cable on your neck... you can hear it through your body.

My overall impression of the VR scene is that big AAA titles, or even just good titles with some length and depth, are close to non-existent and will probably stay that way while developers aren't going to risk a big commitment on such a small market. Meanwhile the amount of shovelware there is available.. be it on the Vive, Steam, or Rift store, is so high. Honestly it makes the platform look undeservedly bad. Needs stricter curating... but maybe for now the way it is is how it has to work.

Remember you can refund games on steam if you do it within 2 weeks and have played it less than 2 hours. Could be a good way to try out the premium priced games.

I've finished superhot (non VR). It's very meh. You can see bullet trajectories in slow mo, yet can only move horizontally. It seems a wasted opportunity,as it would be sweet if you could crouch under them. Plus im getting tired of these non-textured-as-an-artistic-choice games.

Is Firewatch VR? That was a good "game" (Its purely a walking narrative). Though if the graphics get scaled down as bad as you say, it might break the immersion too much.

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